iPhone 6 Screen Resolution, Points, and Pixels Explained

There were a lot of questions surrounding the rumored iPhone 6 display resolution. A few had well-reasoned extrapolations based on conjecture, but ultimately we had no idea. Now that the hardware is public and our iOS 8 SDKs are gold master, we finally have the numbers. And…. they’re not what we expected.

Yup – 3x graphics are there for the iPhone 6 Plus, but by the time those images hit the screen, they’ve been down sampled by about 15%. I’m sure the 6 Plus screen looks absolutely delicious, but I can’t imagine what that scaling factor is actually going to look like. Or maybe I do. Having owned a retina Macbook Pro, I’m familiar with scaling on the retina display. It’s actually hardly noticeable. Maybe if I get up close I could see some sort of issue, but I haven’t yet.

We have higher resolution on-screen now, but the UI should be about the same size as it always has; it’s important to Apple that touch just works.